Plame again

I thought I was done with my little obsession with l’affaire Plame, in which the White House retaliated against Joseph Wilson for calling bullshit on their claims of an Iraqi nuclear weapons program by blowing the cover of his CIA spook wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, through White House aide Scooter Libby.

The trail went cold when President Bush commuted Libby’s sentence for his participation … and unwillingness to testify about who was involved. It seemed that we would never know exactly how Bush and Cheney were involved, though we have good evidence that Cheney gave the order to Libby. That commutation of the sentence should have been grounds for impeachment — since it was the President using his pardoning power to protect himself — but you know how it goes.

I thought that was that, but now, via DeLong, I learn that Marcy Wheeler at Emptywheel just caught Scott McClellan, former White House Press Secretary, revealing something important.

I learned that the President had secretly declassified the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq for the Vice President and Scooter Libby to anonymously disclose to reporters [⋯] I walk onto Air Force One and a reporter had yelled a question to the President trying to ask him a question about this revelation that had come out during the legal proceedings. The revelation was that it was the President who had authorized, or, enable Scooter Libby to go out there and talk about this information. And I told the President that that’s what the reporter was asking. He was saying that you, yourself, was the one that authorized the leaking of this information. And he said ‘yeah, I did.’ And I was kinda taken aback.

I’m kinda taken aback too. This is slippery, since it’s in the context of talking about the leak of the National Intelligence Estimate. But. We know that Libby leaked both the NIE and Plame’s identity to journalist Judy Miller at the same time. It’s not hard to connect the dots and conclude that the President of the United States authorized his lieutenants to blow the cover of an American spy who was working to prevent nuclear proliferation.

Indiana Jones and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Okay, so in retrospect, I was kinder to this movie at the time than most folks were then and I would be now. Sue me. It was refreshing to see Spielberg just having fun, and I still think I was right about the charms it does have.

---

Nothing really needs to be said beyond what you’ve doubtless already heard: yeah, it delivers the goods.

No, it doesn’t measure up to Raiders of the Lost Ark, but that was simply a charmed film ... and in my own case it benefits from having first cast its spell over me when I was ten years old. But Crystal Skull is fun, it gets the important things right, and it gave me the thing I wanted most. (I’ll get to that last.)

Sixty seconds into the movie it reminds you that Mrn Steven Spielberg really knows how to move the camera. All the gripes that cinephiles make about Spielberg are true: his tendency to drift into schmaltz, his incapacity to understand women, the deliberateness that squeezes out any interesting ambiguities, the lack of story sense, and so on. But I think the real reason for all the kvetching about Spielberg is resentment that these weaknesses are yoked to his uncanny talent for putting the camera where any normal director would think it shouldn't be ... and making it work.

Likewise we see George Lucas’ great strength on display as well. Like many, I curse Lucas’ many deficiencies, but the man knows how to get magic out of his production designers. All of the stuff in the picture is delicious. There’s a scene in a sort of a rocket lab that I wished was longer, just so I could enjoy looking at the set. Mutt’s motorcycle is the stuff that biker dreams are made of. And the picture’s one sequence with real satirical bite, commenting on ’50s suburban culture, works in large part because the production design is so spot-on.

All of the action scenes are brisk and fun, though I had a couple of quibbles. First, though Mr. Spielberg has crowed about resisting the temptations of computer generated effects, favoring real stunts with real people — including an awful lot done by an impressively spry Harrison Ford himself — there’s still more CG in the picture than there should be: grubby matte paintings and miniatures are part of the look of the Indiana Jones, for me. Second, there are a few bits that violate the compact of “realism” I felt was kept in Raiders: Indiana Jones’ acts of derring-do may be wildly implausible, but should never feel impossible.

The crystal skull itself is a bit of a departure in tone from the mystical artifacts of past pictures. (There’s a bit of a possible spoiler there that I’ll resist, though the picture gives it away pretty early.) I was happy to roll with it, since I felt it was still in keeping with the the pulp tradition, but I can see how other folks might feel otherwise. What can you do? The Ark of the Covenant is pretty much the best MacGuffin ever, so nothing else is going to fully satisfy. I think I was sustained in large part by the hint of the Lovecraftian about the Skull's story ... which made me dream of going all the way to Indiana Jones and the Fish Men of Innsmouth or Indiana Jones and the Mountains of Madness. How cool would those be?

The actors are all having a hammy good time. It’s still a pleasure to see Harrison Ford in the hat; his greatest talent has always been his screen presence, and we still believe him as Indiana Jones ... though in every scene he communicates the old joke about “I’m getting too old for this” without having to spoil things by saying it in so many words. Just about everyone else in the picture is also pretty keen. Cate Blanchett manages to be more weirdly, delightfully inhuman than she was as Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings, if you can believe that. Shia LaBoeuf gets a role that’s almost as big an opportunity for embarrassment as his part in Transformers and makes it work. Likewise Ray Winstone, who keeps it together in a part that was obviously originally written for Daffy Duck. The movie doesn’t give the mangificent John Hurt enough to do, but then no movie ever could, so he quietly chews the scenery just the right amount.

Which brings me to the real reason I wanted to see the movie.

When I was ten years old I fell in love with Karen Allen as Marion Ravenwood, and I’m not too proud to admit that I’m still carrying a torch for her. George Lucas insisted that like James Bond, Indiana Jones should have a different love interest in every picture, but in my heart I have always known that Marion was Indy’s true love. When they revealed at Comicon that Karen Allen was back (you can see it at 3:00 on this video) Im told that the assembled crowd broke into hysterical applause, so I guess I’m not alone. It’s said that Frank Darabont’s attempt at a script for Indy 4 played her as Indy's equal partner in adventure, and I’m peeved that in Crystal Skull she’s mostly reduced to looking gorgeous and driving the car. But Harrison Ford plays Indy as giddy at the sight of her, as he should, so I walked out of the theater a happy man.

Green cities

I went to college at the University of California at Santa Cruz. It's a strange and beautiful campus, with vast meadows and classroom buildings peeking out between trees on forested hillsides. I'd often see deer pass within a few yards of me while on my way to class. There was a strongly hippie-ish student culture there, and it was easy to dream utopian dreams of a world like the campus: great cities woven gently into nature, filled with bicyclists stopping at little restaurants to enjoy an organic salad on their way home from work.

But David Owen, writing in The New Yorker, has a different idea.

My wife and I got married right out of college, in 1978. We were young and naïve and unashamedly idealistic, and we decided to make our first home in a utopian environmentalist community in New York State. For seven years, we lived, quite contentedly, in circumstances that would strike most Americans as austere in the extreme: our living space measured just seven hundred square feet, and we didn't have a dishwasher, a garbage disposal, a lawn, or a car. We did our grocery shopping on foot, and when we needed to travel longer distances we used public transportation. Because space at home was scarce, we seldom acquired new possessions of significant size. Our electric bills worked out to about a dollar a day.

The utopian community was Manhattan. (Our apartment was on Sixty-ninth Street, between Second and Third.) Most Americans, including most New Yorkers, think of New York City as an ecological nightmare, a wasteland of concrete and garbage and diesel fumes and traffic jams, but in comparison with the rest of America it's a model of environmental responsibility. By the most significant measures, New York is the greenest community in the United States, and one of the greenest cities in the world. The most devastating damage humans have done to the environment has arisen from the heedless burning of fossil fuels, a category in which New Yorkers are practically prehistoric. The average Manhattanite consumes gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasn't matched since the mid-nineteen-twenties, when the most widely owned car in the United States was the Ford Model T. Eighty-two per cent of Manhattan residents travel to work by public transit, by bicycle, or on foot. That's ten times the rate for Americans in general, and eight times the rate for residents of Los Angeles County. New York City is more populous than all but eleven states; if it were granted statehood, it would rank 51^st in per-capita energy use.

Owen's article is long and fascinating, and I recently learned that CNN reports that he's right about energy use.

These days I no longer dream of forest cities like UCSC, but of tall steel arcologies alive with people riding its railcars, sitting in the teahouses on the breezy balconies, walking the twisty boulevards of the core that are dappled with sunlight streaming through the superstructure ...

Literalization of metaphor

Nailing Jell-o to a wall.

Herding cats.

And my new favourite:

Drinking tea with chopsticks in zero gravity, which means “something which sounds absurdly, impossibly difficult but turns out to be the easy right answer.”

Gender

This long passage from “The Roads Round Pisa,” one among Isak Dinesen's Seven Gothic Tales, is for three of the most beautiful women in the world, all of whom I know to read this blog: one who goaded me to this with Simone Weil, one who recently wrote about a game of dress-up that made me ache with longing for home, and one who recently lent me an excellent book containing lore about a gentleman's handkerchiefs.

Behind a cut, because it's long ....

The reader unfamiliar with Isak Dinesen may find this passage informed by a few observations:

• Seven Gothic Tales, Dinesen's first book, was originally published in 1934.
• “Isak Dinesen” was a male nom de plume which Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke adopted, fearing that as a woman she would not be published.
• The passage takes place at a roadside inn in Pisa sometime hazily around the late 19^th century. “Count Augustus von Schimmelmann, a young Danish nobleman of a melancholy disposition” has been talking to a young Italian carriage-driver. “The boy seem to feel that he had here met a brother of the unhappy Danish Prince [Hamlet], and to open his heart to the stranger on this account.“ At this point, the two have been talking about the Italian's reasons for abandoning poetry in favour of the study of astronomy.

---

“.... I want to turn to the infinity of space, and from what I have heard it seems to me that the roads of the planets and stars, their elipses and circles within the infinite space, must have the power to turn the mind into new ways. Do you not think so, Signore?”

Augustus thought of the time, not many years ago, when he had himself felt the spheres his right home. “I think,” he said sadly, “that life has its law of gravitation spiritually as well as physically. Landed property, women—” He looked out through the window. On the blue sky of the spring evening Venus stood, radiant as a diamond.

The boy turned toward him. “You do not,” he said, “really think that I am a man? I am not, and under your favor, I am happy not to be. I know, of course, that great work has been achieved by men, but still I think that the world would be a more tranquil place if men did not come in to break up, very often, the things that we cherish.”

Augustus became confused to find that he had been treating a young lady as a boy, but he could not apologize for it, as it was not his fault. He made haste to introduce himself and to ask if he could be of any assistance to her on her journey. The girl, however, did not alter her manner toward him in the least, and seemed quite indifferent to any change in his attitude toward her which her information might have caused. She sat in the same position, with her slender knees crossed under her cloak and her hands folded around one knee. Augustus thought that he had hardly ever talked to a young woman whose chief interest in the conversation had not been the impression that she herself was making on him, and he reflected that this must be what generally made converse with women awkward and dull to him. The way in which this young woman seemed to take a friendly and confident interest in him, without apparently giving any thought to what he thought of her, seemed to him new and sweet, as if he suddenly realized that he had all his life been looking for such an attitude in a woman. He wished that he could now himself keep away from the conventional accent of male and female conversation.

“It is very sad,” he said thoughtfully, “that you should think so little of us, for I am sure that all men that you have met have tried to please you. Will you not tell me why it should be so? For it has happened to me many times that a lady has told me that I was making her unhappy, and that she wished that she and I were dead, at a time when I have tried hardest to make her happy. It is so many years now since Adam and Eve”—he looked across the room to a picture of them—“were first together in the garden, that it seems a great pity that we have not learned better how to please one another.”

“And did you not ask her?” said the girl.

“Yes,” he answered, “but it seemed to be our fate that we should never take up these questions in cold blood. For myself, I think that women, for some reason, will not let us know. They do not want an understanding. They want to mobilize for war. But I wish that once, in all the time of men and women, two ambassadors could meet in a friendly mind and come to understand each other. It is true,” he added after a moment, “that I did once meet, in Paris, a woman, a great courtesan, who might have been such an ambassador. But you would hardly have given her your letters of credence or have submitted to her decisions. I do not even know if you would not have considered her a traitor to your sex.”

The girl thought for a time of what he had said. “I suppose,” she then said, “that even in your country you have parties, balls and conversazione?”

“Yes,” he said, “we have those.”

“Then you will know,” she went on slowly, “that the part of a guest is different from that of a host or hostess, and that people do not want or expect the same things in the two different capacities?”

“I think you are right,” said Augustus.

“Now God,” she said, “when he created Adam and Eve”—she also looked at them across the room—“arranged it so that man takes, in these matters, the part of a guest, and a woman that of a hostess. Therefore man takes love lightly, for the honor and dignity of his house is not involved therein. And you can also, surely, be a guest to many people to whom you would never want to be a host. Now, tell me, Count, what does a guest want?”

“I believe,” said Augustus when he had though for a moment, “that if we do, as I think we ought to here, leave out the crude guest, who comes to be regaled, takes what he can get and goes a way, a guest wants first of all to be diverted, to get out of his daily monotony or worry. Secondly the decent guest wants to shine, to expand himself and impress his own personality upon his surroundings. And thirdly, perhaps, we wants to find some justification for his existence altogether. But since you put it so charmingly, Signora, please tell me now: What does a hostess want?”

“The hostess,” said the young lady, “wants to be thanked.”

Good news

I read the news today, oh boy.

There were whoops of joys and hugs and tears among scores of gay rights advocates and same-sex couples this morning outside the California Supreme Court building in San Francisco as word spread that the justices had cleared the way for gay and lesbian marriages.

Geoff Kors, executive director of Equality California, a gay rights group, ran out of the building on McAllister Street and screamed, “We won!”

I also cannot resist re-linking Mark Morford's celebration of marriage from four years ago.

I was there. I saw the lines, the smiles, felt the intense emotional energy. It was simply irrefutable: These are people in love. These are couples who have been together for years, decades, who have started families and raised children and set up homes replete with dogs and dinner parties and antiques and regular shopping excursions to Safeway and the mall. You know, just like "real" Americans.

These are couples who are willing to go the distance, to commit and connect, and who are eager to prove to themselves and the world that their love is something true and real and momentous, something that, in truth, can only serve to reignite and reunite our stagnant, fractured, contentious, 50 percent-divorce-rate nation. Hey, we need all the help we can get.

And one other thing was very apparent: It was a situation in which you simply could not imagine anyone hurling gobs of intolerant hate at it. It would have required a serious amount of nasty, inbred ignorance and appalling nerve to march up to any of the passionate and committed couples waiting patiently in line for their marriage ceremony and say, you know, God hates you for this, you immoral disgusting sodomites, and it's intolerable and unacceptable that you wish to love and honor each other till death do you part.

I'm sorry I cannot be in my city to celebrate today.

Pride Flag Flying Over the Armory (where ordinarily they fly the Jolly Roger originally uploaded by Thomas Roche

Iron Man

io9's review of Iron Man, by the radiant Charlie Jane Anders, is spot on.

Iron Man is the first comic-book movie that's actually better than its source material. That's partly because Iron Man is one of the most boring characters in the history of comics, but it's also because the movie manages to transcend its source.

Oh, and don't make the mistake I did by leaving before the end credits finish; rumour has it there's a rockin' monk's reward.

Ouch!

Since I know that my readership is unusually well-populated with belly dancers, I commend to your attention this video which my colleagues have become obsessed with. Watch to the end.

"There is no such thing as an antiwar film to a US Marine"

Holy Baudriard, Batman. Soldiers in Iraq appear to have learned how to decorate a military encampment by watching reruns of M*A*S*H.

Bisy backson

I've gone beyond so busy that I'm only posting links to YouTube videos all the way to so busy that I'm posting links to old posts of my own.

Cuteness and punk rock

Equinox

I plan to spend the day looking for balance ....

Anniversary

Five years today.

I have neither the time nor the inclination today to outline the numberless Iraqi dead, the almost four thousand American dead, the thousands more American soldiers maimed in mind or body, the war crimes, the erosion of our armed forces' strength, the lost mystique of our intelligence services, the strengthening of al Qaeda and Islamist jihadism, the unrecoverable loss of American credibility, the corrosive effect on our whole political culture. I'll just give you this piece from the Financial Times about the money: Iraq war costs inspire shock and awe.

Six months before the start of the US led-invasion, Larry Lindsey, then White House economic adviser, estimated that the war in Iraq could cost as much as ^$200bn.

The claim, which cost Mr Lindsey his job, was dismissed as baloney by Donald Rumsfeld, the then defence secretary whose own estimate was ^$50bn to ^$60bn. Andrew Natsios, head of the Agency for International Development, estimated the reconstruction of Iraq would cost the US ^$1.7bn (€1.1bn, £849m).

These estimates have proved to be what the war’s critics say is just one of many grievous miscalculations. The Iraq war will be five years old on Tuesday, and serious estimates suggest it will be, with the exception of the second world war, the most costly in US history. Two academics estimate the government is spending ^$12bn a month in Iraq, while the Joint Economic Committee of Congress says the war has so far cost a US family of four ^$16,900, a bill that could rise to ^$37,000 by 2017.

The most conservative estimate of the war’s cost comes from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, whose remit limits its analysis to US government spending. Up to September 30, the end of the 2007 fiscal year, it says ^$413bn was spent on Iraq. From then until the end of 2017, it calculates overall spending on Iraq and Afghanistan at ^$570bn-^$1,055bn, depending on how quickly troop numbers are reduced. If three-quarters of the budget is spent on Iraq, the ratio of recent years, future direct budgetary costs would be a further ^$428bn to ^$788bn.

Interest payments on debt raised so far and attributable to the Iraq war would cost ^$290bn up to 2017, with a ­further ^$131bn to ^$218bn ­covering spending over the next 10 years. This would bring the US government bill until 2017 for Iraq to ^$1,300bn-^$2,000bn.

That's right. More than a trillion dollars.

If you had a trillion dollars, what would be the first thing you would spent it on?

Google Sky

Today I think of what Galileo would have given to have access to Google Sky.

Spitzer

Despite being crazy busy with work and meshugass the last couple of weeks, I've stumbled into a few reports about this tiresome Eliot Spitzer sex scandal thing. It's evidently everywhere. Blah blah blah, famed breaker of prostitution rings spends thousands on call girls, blah blah blah. I didn't care until I saw this comment from Dragon Lady Flame.

2) Do I think Spitzer was a hypocrite? Maybe. I've thought over and over about what was going through his head. Did his urge to punish johns come from a deep-seated guilt? Did his dogged work against prostitution rings also arise partly from that deep-seated guilt?

2a) I doubt it. Why? Because, as was best summed up by my friend Zach (who once interned with Spitzer), "the hooker rings he busted as an AG were more of the human trafficking variety than the $5000/hr variety." In other words, the prostitution that Spitzer cracked down on was closer to rape / abuse / sex slavery than it was to a white, educated, English-speaking American citizen freely consenting to have sex for money. And, of course, the johns he thought deserved punishment were doing something a lot more analogous to paying for rape than paying for consensual sex.

Whoa.

I don't have to get my feminism on and rant about how consent is not that %&*@!! difficult a #*&@!! concept because she's done it for me.

The papers, TV, etc. are treating this case as if it's all about insane hypocrisy — he brought down prostitution and yet patronized prostitutes! gasp! — when a minimum of reflection will show that Eliot Spitzer was not patronizing the kind of prostitutes whose activities he aimed to take down. There's a huge difference between (a) an illiterate downtrodden woman whose pimp beats her, rapes her and takes all her money ... and (b) Ashley Alexandra Dupré. There's a world of difference. Eliot Spitzer was patronizing the second, not the first — and it really says something about how fucked up Americans are, that everyone seems to think that patronizing the second is practically the same as the first.

The distinction is more than just important. It's crucial. Apparently, most Americans consider Ashley Alexandra Dupré to be just as victimized as your average street whore — or, conversely, they consider your average street whore to be just as empowered as Ashley Alexandra Dupré. The failure to grasp the difference is at the heart of much current commentary on this issue.

And while we're on the subject, I may as well offer a long reflection by a former escorts' booking agent which makes some sense of Mr Spitzer ... and offers a pretty bleak view of the human condition.

Archive

Of interest to my readers working in IT and suchlike fields of endeavor: David Gewirtz' article about the White House email archiving scandal. Here's the bit that hooked me:

Yes, boys and girls, the White House archives its email to PST files.

Hint: It involves the internet

Via Content Love, I have the answer to the baffling question, “What do these things have in common?”

1. K. D. Lang (or k. d. lang)
2. Oral sex
3. Olivia Newton-John
4. Rotary International
5. Pop-punk
6. Speedy Gonzales
7. Barry Manilow
8. Bonnie and Clyde
9. 4Kids Entertainment
10. Geordi La Forge
11. Spam
12. Truth

Go ahead, guess.

Big Day

The nice people at Volkswagen were kind enough to fund the creation of what may be my favourite 60-second film.

Arrr!

I've recently learned that Steve Jackson, the famous game designer, is a collector of Pirate Legos. Unsurprisingly, he uses them to play Evil Stevie's Pirate Game.

This is a game, involving elements of both roleplaying and tactical combat, in which grown men and women sit on the floor and push toy pirate ships around, going “Arrrr!”

Sounds great.

Y'know, my nephew has quite a few pirate Legos ...

Slums

Christopher B. Leinberger, writing in The Atlantic, writes about the coming decline of suburbs and observes how physically unprepared the 'burbs are to evolve into something more appropriate for the world of expensive oil we're soon to be living in.

Suburbia’s many small parcels of land, held by different owners with different motivations, make the purchase of whole neighborhoods almost unheard-of. Condemnation of single-family housing for “higher and better use” is politically difficult, and in most states it has become almost legally impossible in recent years. In any case, the infrastructure supporting large-lot suburban residential areas—roads, sewer and water lines—cannot support the dense development that urbanization would require, and is not easy to upgrade. Once large-lot, suburban residential landscapes are built, they are hard to unbuild.

The experience of cities during the 1950s through the ’80s suggests that the fate of many single-family homes on the metropolitan fringes will be resale, at rock-bottom prices, to lower-income families—and in all likelihood, eventual conversion to apartments.

This future is not likely to wear well on suburban housing. Many of the inner-city neighborhoods that began their decline in the 1960s consisted of sturdily built, turn-of-the-century row houses, tough enough to withstand being broken up into apartments, and requiring relatively little upkeep. By comparison, modern suburban houses, even high-end McMansions, are cheaply built. Hollow doors and wallboard are less durable than solid-oak doors and lath-and-plaster walls. The plywood floors that lurk under wood veneers or carpeting tend to break up and warp as the glue that holds the wood together dries out; asphalt-shingle roofs typically need replacing after 10 years. Many recently built houses take what structural integrity they have from drywall—their thin wooden frames are too flimsy to hold the houses up.

As the residents of inner-city neighborhoods did before them, suburban homeowners will surely try to prevent the division of neighborhood houses into rental units, which would herald the arrival of the poor. And many will likely succeed, for a time. But eventually, the owners of these fringe houses will have to sell to someone ...

James Howard Kunstler, as I mentioned a while back, calls this problem Peak Suburbia, and with the lending crisis growing ever worse, it's clear that this watershed has definitely arrived.

Candidates

Senator Obama may have the inspirational music—and it's worth thinking about what it means that as a candidate he's inspiring that flavour of enthusiasm—but Tina Fey makes the case for Senator Clinton with some mighty applied feminism.

Stairway

Ever wonder how the Beatles, circa 1964, would have performed Led Zeppelin's “Stairway to Heaven”?

Yeah, me neither.

Well, Beatles soundalike band The Beatnix have considered the question, and they have a pretty impressive answer.

Sock

I'm not quite sure how I found this.

Meditation & Violence
A short video, using sock puppet actors, focusing on two incidents within the life and times of Allen Ginsberg; (1) a segment for an appearence on Firing Line w/ William F. Buckley, and (2) a sound collage from the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, IL. with Ginsberg chanting over top.

It is vastly more entertaining than it sounds.

Infographics

The Song Chart Meme has a bit of a poor signal-to-noise ratio, but the successful efforts are impressive.

If you liked that there's also Qwantz' Bullet Points Song Meme which I've contributed to myself ... and, of course, there's the infographic-porn video for Royksopp's song “Remind Me.”

American music

I see that the Asylum Street Spankers are hitting the road again.

Austin readers: go to Momo's Friday night at 9:00 or the SXSW showcase at Esther's Follies on Thursday the 13^th.

San Diego readers: I'll be at their 10 pm show at The Casbah on Sunday the 23^rd.

Portland readers: They play the Aladdin on Saturday 29 March.

San Francisco readers: They're doing double shows, at 8:00 and 10:00 pm, at Du Nord on Friday the 4^th of April.

LA readers: The next day, they'll be at Safari Sam's in Hollywood.

Someone once asked me what kind of music they play, and I realized that I didn't have a good name for it. “Uh ... American music.” You'd recognize it. Like you might hear on “West Coast Live” or “The Prairie Home Companion” and think ooh, that's really fun.

(Oh, and Mr James McMurtry: it is only because of this that I see you're playing Momo's on Saturday, since I've been foolish enough to think that your website is a good place to find your upcoming showtimes. See to that, would you? I'm looking for an opportunity to fly to Austin to see you, and this woulda been a good time.)

Back on the air

OK, it's been forever since I've been blogging regularly, thanks to some serious distractions, as well as the fact that I didn't get my home internet squared away until a few weeks ago.

I sort of made a resolution that I wouldn't go back to regular blogging until I had my New San Diego Life squared away. And I'm not quite there yet: my apartment remains in a bit of a state of chaos, I have a whopping five hundred unread emails in my inbox, there are a number of errands I still have dangling that are really a higher priority than blogging. But in the meantime, I've been tucking away the occasional tidbit for use here once I'm back to daily blogging, and they're starting to pile up.

And I really miss blogging.

So. I'm back to once a day. To my Faithful Readers, I apologize for being away for so long.

I am ten years old again

Who can resist?

It's the music, right?

Endorsements

A couple of indecisive friends have asked my opinion about the forthcoming primary election.

First, a quick word for California voters baffled by the referenda on Indian gaming. The propaganda on both sides of this is unhelpfully blathery, but I managed to track down someone who knows what's actually going on. Basically, the casinos are going to happen, one way or another. The question is what the specific terms of the agreement with the State of California will be, primarily around tax revenue. If the referrenda fail, there will be another round of political negotiations, and the bottom line will almost certainly be a better deal for the state. Given that with California's deeply broken budget, we need every nickel we can get, I'm voting No on all four of 'em.

And then there's these candidates for President.

I want to start with some comments about John McCain, in case I have any readers who are tempted. I have an embarrassing admission about the Senator: I spent a few months in 2000 as a registered Republican so I could vote for McCain in the primary. I wasn't sure I wanted him to be President, but I was curious to see what would happen next. It's tempting for me to dismiss it now, but for a while there he really had fallen under this weird spell where he was telling the truth. The main thing was the role of money in politics, but it extended to a number of other things, as well. His record as Senator had been reflexively conservative, right along the Republican party line, but because he was having real conversations with journalists it looked like he was thinking seriously about some questions for the first time. Most famously, there was an incident where he was saying the usual stuff about opposing abortion, and a journalist asked him the old what-if-it-was-your-daughter question and McCain reflexively snapped “that would be different” ... and according to folks who were there, he paused, obviously having that waaaait a minute moment which what-if is supposed to provoke. He was evolving right in front of our eyes, and I respected that, and so I voted for him in the primary.

But while the press still love him because of that time, it turns out that what he evolved into was a monster. The Republican kingmakers kicked his ass with dirty tricks during those primaries, which is why he didn't end up the nominee. The Senator learned his lesson, and has spent the last seven years carrying water for the Bush administration. On his two signature issues—campaign finance reform and the use of torture—he's delivered some pretty good rhetoric (and gods bless him for that) but then he signed toothless “compromise” legislation. More significantly, he's one of those folks who just snapped on 9/11. It turned him into a bloodthirsty warmonger. He's been a cheerleader for the Iraq war from the beginning, the “surge” was his baby, and he routinely talks about a decades-long occupation of the country ... as well as attacking Iran, Syria, or anyone else he can get his bloody hands on.

Enough about McCain. The real question: Obama or Clinton?

On one level, this choice is an embarrassment of riches. They're both strong, electable candidates, and they're both very smart. Given the roster of lame Democratic contenders in the last few decades, this is heady stuff.

Both of them have policy positions that are pretty good. For the record, neither is the progressive policy wonk I'd really like; that was my man John Edwards, who was very serious about the problem of poverty in America and very forthright about specific policy details. But the press hated him, and he could only get traction among bourgeois White liberals like me. It's pretty bizarre that the antipoverty populist progressive only had rich White guys supporting him in this race, but then American politics is pretty bizarre all around. With that caveat, both of Obama and Clinton are still pretty good on policy, and there aren't terribly substantive differences between the two ... with one big exception.

That exception is the Iraq war, and what it means for America.

Senator Obama's story is that he was an articulate opponent of the Iraq war from the beginning. There's a touch of exaggeration in that claim, but only a touch; it's evident that he saw clearly that it was a bad idea, for all the right reasons. It's pretty clear that he will look to withdraw the US from Iraq as quickly as possible, and won't be pulling any other military adventurism as President.

Senator Clinton's story, on the other hand, is complicated. She supported the war early on, and evolved into a critic of it ... though a pretty tepid one. They lied to us. They conducted the war poorly. True enough, but even if the Bush administration's claims were true, and even if they had conducted the war intelligently, it was still both stupid and evil. Senator Clinton hasn't said that and I fear that she doesn't really understand it. This plugs into how as a Senator, she has worked very hard in a number of ways to overcome the unsurprising distrust of folks at the Pentagon, and carefully built a credible reputation as A Democrat Tough On National Security.

If I can wax feminist for a second, I believe that Senator Clinton has decided that, as a woman, she has had to overcompensate and act more-warlike-than-thou or face inevitable sexist criticism that “she isn't tough enough to be Commander in Chief.” Unhappily, she's probably right. So what I'm doing here is criticizing her for doing what she has to do to succeed in the face of a sexist society. My criticism is, in an important way, a further reïnforcement of sexism: damned if you do, damned if you don't. I don't feel real comfortable doing it.

But. Right now, A Democrat Tough On National Security is a serious liability, both as a President and as a candidate. We need a President who can rebuild some American moral credibility on the world stage in the wake of the Iraq war fiasco; we need to make Bush an aberration, not show that Americans are warmongers across the board. And the Democrats need a candidate who can tell the American people, who have soured on the war, that they will end this war and not get us into another one like it.

And this takes us to what is, ultimately, a style thing. It's tricky, and an embarrassingly important question in what candidate to choose.

The case for Senator Clinton is that she's a street fighter who can win the election in November and win legislative victories as President. Recall that George W. Bush, who pulled strings to avoid serving in Vietnam, defeated John Kerry, the decorated infantryman, by convincing people that Kerry was a coward. The Republican slime machine is inescapable and can attack anybody. This is the counter-argument to “Hillary has too much baggage.” By the time the Republicans are through, everyone has “baggage;” the Democrats could resurrect George Washington and run him as the candidate and the Republicans would find a way to manufacture “baggage” for him. If anything, this is an argument in favour of Clinton: she's the best-vetted candidate in history, and we can be sure by now that there's no new dirt to dig up on her. Even more importantly, after what she and Bill Clinton went through during his administration, there is no greater expert in the world in fighting that Republican slime machine than Hillary Clinton.

This is no small advantage. In my more pessimistic days, which are legion, I think tha the right thing for Democrats to do is to accept this process as reality and just get tough about fighting it. In which case, Hillary Clinton is near enough to being the ideal candidate.

Barack Obama is a very different answer to the same problem. His candidacy is a bet that the American people are sick of the Republican propaganda machine's nasty, polarizing effect on the political process, and that it's possible to rise above that process, to run as a voice of moderation, and win.

Clinton is the candidate of winning the game, Obama is the candidate of changing the game.

Obama's powerful “bringing America together” rhetoric—and his mushiness on policy—are both characteristic of this approach. What does Obama stand for? It's hard to tell, beyond changing the style of American politics. But right now changing the style of American politics is a worthwhile goal. The question is whether it will work, and I go round and round about that. It may be that Obama is simply naïve, and that the Republicans will find a way to slime him too and make his ploy impossible. But with a deeply unpopular Republican President and weak Republican candidates, this year may be the best opportunity we'll get to change the face of American politics. On the other hand, I said that last time, with Bush the unpopular author of unpopular policy, and he trounced a pretty strong Democratic candidate who just couldn't find a way to beat the Republicans' propaganda.

So Clinton is the safe bet, and Obama is rolling the dice and hoping for greatness. I think that this goes not only for the campaigns, but the Presidential administrations they would produce. It's easy to imagine the Clinton presidency: smart, pragmatic, moderately liberal, politically crafty, winning many small battles in Congress. It's very hard to imagine what the Obama presidency would really be like. Bold, effective new coalitions winning big victories that Americans want like ending the war in Iraq and fixing American healthcare? Or mired in political clumsiness in which very little actually gets done? Or something else? Who knows?

I'll be satisfied with either candidate, and contribute heavily to their campaign. And I think there's no dishonour in voting for either one.

But for me, I can't get past Hillary Clinton's tacit support for the Iraq war. And I'm ready to roll the dice and hope for greatness. I think we're overdue for it.

And. Seriously. A Black man named Barack Obama as President of the United States? Just try and tell me that ain't a victory worth voting for.

Protest

Warren Ellis has been following closely the recent series of spooky little propaganda videos posted on YouTube from the mysterious web anarchists Anonymous. The good people of Anonymous have taken exception to the Church of Scientology, and are initiating an anti-Scientology propaganda war.

The videos are incredibly compelling on every level—as crafty filmmaking, as propaganda, as cunning use of web technology. Warren Ellis observes ...

One of the things fascinating me about these video communications from Anonymous — aside from the obvious, an anonymous organisation of internet users communicating only through YouTube, which has implications and resonance of its own — is the sense of foreboding they manage to create. Contrast that to, say, the Yippies and the retarded gibberish they spouted every time they got near a camera. There’s a sense of control here, and, clearly, of threat.

The videos so far, which I encourage readers to check out:

Message to Scientology
Dear News Organizations
Call to Action
GLaDOS guide to february 10th

(I should observe here that Mr Ellis also links to a video from a major anti-Scientology activist who disapproves of Anonymous' approach.)

I bring this up because that last video has something of general interest to many of my readers, whether or not they care about the social effects of the web, Scientology, or film as an art form: the bulk of the video is an excellent guide to effective public protests.

I have a transcript of the complete rules for conducting an effective protest ...

These rules do not represent the writings and ideas of any one person. Rules may vary depending on your location.

The following video is intended as guide for Anonymous preparing to engage in their first real-life public demonstration. It will also provide a refresher for those of you who have experience with this modality of petition.

The purpose of the demonstration in a modern Western society is to convey a message to the public. In keeping with this objective, Anonymous has drafted 22 rules that Anonymous can follow in order to assure epic win and no loss of hit points on your part.

Rule #0: Rules 1 and 2 of the internet still apply. Your memes are not, at this juncture, something that the real world can appreciate. Although meme speak between fellow Anonymous is acceptable, focus on the target and keep it to a minimum.

Rule #1: Stay cool.

Rule #2: Stay cool, especially when harassed. You are an ambassador of Anonymous. Although individuals trying to disrupt your demonstration will get on your nerves, you must not lose your temper. Doing so will harm the protest and tarnish the reputation of Anonymous.

Rule #3: Comply with the orders of law enforcement officers above all else. Doing otherwise is harmful to the demonstration as a whole and may compromise your performance as a human being. Do not request badge numbers unless you are being treated in a very abusive manner, as doing so will anger officers.

Rule #4: Notify city officials. Most jurisdictions either have rules about public protests, or would prefer to be notified that they are taking place. Know the rules for your jurisdiction and abide by them.

Rule #5: Always be across the street from the object being protested.

Rule #6: In the absence of a road, find another natural barrier between yourself and the target of protest. Doing so will make it more difficult for individuals hostile to your cause to come and harass you.

Rule #7: Stay on public property. You may be charged for trespassing if you do not.

Rule #8: No violence.

Rule #9: No weapons. The demonstration is a peaceful event. “Your weapons; you will not need them.”

Rule #10: No alcohol or pre-drinking. Violating this rule may easily precipitate a violation of rules 1 and 2.

Rule #11: No graffiti, destruction, or vandalism.

Rule #12: If you want to do something stupid, pick another day.

These should be self explanatory. Violation of these rules during a demonstration will tarnish the reputation of Anonymous, harm the demonstration itself and leave you vulnerable to attention from law enforcement.

Rule #13: Anonymous is legion. Never be alone. Isolation during a protest marks you as a target for hostiles who wish to provoke an angry reaction from you and other hostiles. In keeping with this principle ...

Rule #14: Organize in squads of 10 to 15 people.

Rule #15: One or two megaphones per squad. A megaphone is helpful for maintaining the overall cohesion of a demonstration and spreading your message. However, too many will confuse the public and render you hearing impaired.

Rule #16: Know the dress code. Forming a loose yet reasonable dress code for protest members will help to maintain cohesion and get the public to take you seriously.

Rule #17: Cover your face. This will prevent your identification from videos taken by hostiles, other protesters or security. Use scarves, hats and sunglasses. Masks are not necessary, and donning them in the context of a public demonstration is forbidden in some jurisdictions.

Rule #18: Bring water.

Rule #19: Wear good shoes.

Following these rules will assure your comfort during the demonstration. Keep in mind that demonstrations may often be quite lengthy.

Rule #20: Signs, flyers, and phrases—have yours ready. Make sure that signs are large enough to read. Also ensure that the text on your signs and your phrases are pertinent to the target of the protest.

Rule #21: Prepare legible, uncomplicated, and accurate flyers to hand out to those who wish to know more regarding the motivations behind your actions.

Finally, Rule #22: Document the demonstration. Videos and pictures of the event may be used to corroborate your side of the story if law enforcement get involved. Furthermore, posting images and videos of your heroic actions all over the internet is bound to generate win, exhorting other Anonymous to follow your glorious example.

If you follow these simple rules, the success of your action is virtually assured. However, keep in mind that the success of the demonstration as a whole hinges on the good behavior of all those who participate. Ignore these rules at your own peril. Follow them, and victory will be yours.

We are Anonymous.
We do not forgive.
We do not forget.
And now, we are expected.